Baseball Prospectus News

DraftStreet Partnership

It’s certainly no secret that one of the fastest growing segments of the fantasy population these days is daily and weekly fantasy leagues—and we’ve all heard the arguments why. When Jurickson Profar, Kris Medlen, or Jarrod Parker get injured, and you have them on your rotisserie teams, it’s a long-term blow. However, in the world of daily/weekly games, it’s only a blow until you can select your next lineup. You can own Mike Trout one day and Carlos Gonzalez the next. The possibilities are endless, and it’s a whole other way to enjoy the world of fantasy sports.

Here at Baseball Prospectus, we’re proud to announce we’ll be partnering with one of the most recognizable names in this space for the 2014 season, DraftStreet.com. As part of this partnership, we’re going to be publishing strategy pieces twice a week on how to get a leg up in your DraftStreet league, anchored by long-time daily-game player Paul Sporer. If you’re looking for more information on DraftStreet's MLB product, here is some further information from their website:

Being a fantasy baseball winner for an entire season is great, but 162 games over six months is a long time to wait to be crowned as a fantasy baseball champion. With the fantasy baseball cash leagues at DraftStreet, you can compete today for a chance to be a champion tonight and win cash and prizes this evening. Yes, that's right. You can join up in a fantasy baseball money league in a day during the season, and you have the potential to be a winner that very night!

No matter what your skill set, there are many exciting fantasy baseball options to choose from at DraftStreet. Play heads-up in 2-player fantasy baseball money leagues, or enter large pools with over 200 players. Buy-ins range from $1 to over $1,000, or you can play free fantasy baseball leagues and earn Street Cred to use in the DraftStreet Store.

Drafting a fantasy baseball money team is easy with DraftSteet's salary cap style format. Just fill your roster while staying under the budget of $100K. DraftStreet sets the players' salaries based on fantasy production. Or maybe you like live drafts. You can sign up for an instant snake-draft baseball league and draft live against other users. If you like to keep your fantasy baseball games simple, try the Home Run Derby leagues where home runs are the only statistics that count.

So if you’ve been interested in checking out the daily/weekly fantasy game space, now is the perfect time to do it at DraftStreet. And to boot, first time depositors at DraftStreet will receive a 100 percent bonus up to $200. For Opening Day, there are two different ways to get involved:

Completely disagree with this narrow minded comment. As mentioned above the daily game is growing and it will soon be tough to ignore the DFS community as a meaningful part of fantasy baseball... and fantasy sports in general.

Obviously variance in a daily game is huge (which I'm guessing draws your comparison to gambling) but similar to poker, the best players have demonstrated an ability to consistently generate positive ROI by producing above average lineups (relative to salary value) over long periods of time.

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It's been interesting watching the evolution of Baseball Prospectus. It's basically become what it was founded to rail against, selling out the founder's vision for the sake of a buck. Which I completely understand, even if I find it sad.

When BP came of age, sabermetrics was hot. New research, new insights -- and maybe most important, the collective excitement that newness was possible.

That phase of the product life-cycle is passing. Big surprise. The low-hanging research fruit has been picked. What used to be innovative is now conventional wisdom. A lot of today's research is, presumably, being done privately, for teams. And, yes, fan appetite for new hard-to-understand stats with harder-to-understand explanations and weird acronyms isn't what it was.

BP is a "victim" of its own success, which is to say not a victim at all. And that's my point. BP has succeeded. It's original mission is accomplished. Now it's doing what every living thing does --- adapt. That's not sad. That's life.

(And, postscript, I think it's doing a damned fine job of it. The whole scouting-team thing is an unqualified success. This year's fantasy coverage has been pocket aces. The pitching analytics with Doug are commercially unrivaled. The new hitting guy (name escapes me, sorry) is a perfect compliment. Jeff Moore is must-read. Sam Miller's stuff wins its day everytime. Russell Carleton asks the most interesting things of his numbers of any researcher I'm reading anywhere. There's nothing like Transaction Analysis anywhere else out there. Ben Lindbergh's series on catcher-framing was fascinating, and very old-school BP. I miss Matthew Kory. And I've gotta say, partnerships with MLB.TV and DraftSheet --- c'mon. That's pure old fashioned value-added goodness. Really, what more can these guys have possibly done to make BP fun, meaningful and alive?)

It may be about commerce, but these daily/weekly cash games are still gambling. As a longtime user and Premium Subscriber, I am disappointed by this direction and outraged that these games are being lumped into the category of "fantasy baseball" (they are not fantasy baseball any more than placing a bet on which QB will throw the most TD passes in a given week is fantasy football).

There is a completely different degree of luck and unpredictability in daily/weekly games as opposed to full season leagues which require roster management (including free agent acquisitions, lineup changes, and trade activity). You are not "wagering" on immediate player performance...you are managing and positioning your team for success, not only in the context of what players are doing in baseball, but also in the context of your league's specific dynamics. Those are completely different experiences.

Actually, I've lobbied my local league to eliminate the cash component from our game and make it all for bragging rights. I have proposed it to the league on several occasions when we have a major change, but it is always voted down.

But, back to the point, the daily games should be marketed as gambling, and not as Fantasy Baseball. They are two entirely different things and "blurring of the lines" is not an authentic representation of the new "moneygrab" that is daily games.

I don't object to the "gambling" aspect; what you play for, or why, is your business. As a general baseball fan and long-time Scoresheet player, I've been thrilled with BP's increased emphasis on Scoresheet issues and I read everything they can put out on prospects, player skills, and real-life MLB issues.

However, I already skip over all the Rotisserie material; I don't really care for that format and I don't care to read over and over again about how important it is to "target" saves or stolen bases or whatever. The act of counting up stats has little to no bearing on how I enjoy baseball. I am also going to skip over all the DraftStreet stuff.

One concern is that BP is going to invest resources into supporting its DraftStreet section, and the Roti Fantasy material, and those resources can't be used anywhere else. I hope BP doesn't become another Roto site to satisfy the desires of those with one-day attention spans.